


Apple-Geddon

by JuweWright



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Apple - Freeform, F/M, Fluff, harvest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 11:10:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16638830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuweWright/pseuds/JuweWright
Summary: Molly Weasley has asked Fred and Hermione to de-gnome the garden.





	Apple-Geddon

De-gnoming the garden was particularly annoying this year. Hermione managed to grab one of the tiny creatures who was stuffing its face with a raw potato and flung it over the hedge. The gnome squealed and spread its arms out in the air.

“Fred, are you sure that this is the right thing to do with them?” She enquired over her shoulder. “I mean, look at them: they are having way too much fun. I’d bet they come running back into the garden as quick as they can to go for another ride. They’re like children at a fun fair.”

Fred, implementing his new double-windmill technique which meant that he had a gnome in each hand and was flailing his arms in synchronicity, let go of his charges and watched their passage through the air with the expression of a researcher watching his experiment.

“Little too steep in the offset,” he noted, then dove into the next hedge to grab another pair of gnomes. “You might be absolutely right,” he responded to the young witch’s question as he emerged, “But as I’m having enormous fun throwing them over the hedge, I don’t really mind too much if they come back.”

Just as he said that, something hit him on the head with a heavy thud, disorienting him for a second.

“Bloody hell! What was that?” he demanded, turning his head in search of the perpetrator. He half expected to see his brother’s laughing face appear from behind a bush, but the garden behind the burrow stayed silent and George-less.

“Ouch!” Hermione exclaimed as something bounced against her shoulder. She looked around and saw an apple roll across the lawn. Picking it up, she noticed that it wasn’t one of the ripe ones that sometimes dropped to the floor on their own with a little help from the wind. It was a fresh, totally intact apple.

Just when the realisation dawned on her that someone might have thrown that fruit at her, the bombardment began. Both she and Fred were hit by apple after apple, each new impact a little more painful than the one before. Hermione swore and automatically reached for her wand, but as wands weren’t usually helpful in the de-gnoming process, she’d left it inside.

“Aaaaah, ouch! Garden shed! Now!” Fred shouted and stumbled towards the tiny wooden building close by.

Hermione followed suit and a minute later they passed the threshold, banging the door shut behind them. They stood in the dim light, surrounded by Arthur Weasley’s Muggle collection. The shelves bent under the weight of pretty much anything with a plug. There was even a lawnmower which Hermione kept her distance from, remembering what happened when Mr Weasley had put it to use in the summer after casting a couple of spells on it. The lawnmower went rabid and chased after anything remotely human, and had been unstoppable until it finally ran out of fuel.

“Damn,” said Fred, rubbing at a pronounced black spot on his forehead. “They’ve better than they were last year.”

Hermione crossed her arms.

“Fred Weasley, are you telling me that we have just been bombarded with apples by a bunch of mischievous garden gnomes? And that you knew this might happen?” One of the riper fruits had broken when it collided with her head and she unsuccessfully tried to pick the pieces from her curly locks.

“Here, let me help you with that” Fred offered, leaning over and quickly setting to work extracting fruit from hair. Hermione let him handle the situation. He was much better at disentangling her curls than she’d ever been. Fred liked her bushy hair and never got tired of playing with it. It was a little disconcerting, but also kind of cute.

“Okay, Hermione, I admit I knew we were probably going to get hit by flying fruit when mum asked us to do the de-gnoming. I didn’t know how much they’d have improved though. Last year, they hardly knew how to aim properly and the only one that got hit was Ron. Black eye looked quite well on him, I thought, especially after all the stuff he’d been spilling to the Prophet without any respect for your privacy.”

Hermione half-grinned, half-shuddered.

“Don’t remind me of that feature in the Prophet. I was very close to dying from shame when I saw that. I couldn’t walk the streets without somebody asking me about whether any of the juicy bits were true.”

Fred brushed her hair back and placed a light kiss on her forehead.

“It blew over though. Nobody cares about yesterday’s news when somebody exploded a dung-bomb in a ministry worker’s office.” He grinned as he watched her come to the right conclusion from his words.

“That was you?”

The red-head made a mock-attempt at a little bow.

“Sir Fred Weasley, always your knight in shining armour – or in a jumper knitted by my mum. I never liked Finch-Fletchley much and he seemed a willing victim, what with his re-establishing of torture for disobedient house-elves. I also threw one into Pansy’s office at the Prophet for good measure, to stress my point, but that didn’t make the headlines.”

She laughed heartily. “Goodness. I had no idea.”

“I also might have sprayed some of the ingredients we use to make the bomb stink into my little brother’s wardrobe. I ain’t anything if not thorough.”

“You know you could have used that information to woo me?”

Fred shook his head. “That would’ve been petty. I decided that coffee invites, amazing cooking, and taking you to book-sales and privately owned libraries around the country would do the job nicely.”

“You had me at ‘book sale’.”

She leaned into him and Fred wrapped his arm around her shoulders, sinking his nose into her hair. It really smelled like apple now.

“So what do we do about the gnomes in the apple trees?”

He shrugged. “Run around the lawn and dodge the bullets until they run out of apples?”

“And what do we do about the ton of apples that they will have harvested?”

“ _ Accio _ them to the kitchen, leaving it to mum’s enchanted pots and pans to turn them into all things delicious; from apple mousse to apple pie?” Fred suggested.

“Or Accio them and use them to bombard the gnomes out of the trees?” Hermione said with a stern look on her face, running her hand across one of the bruises on her arms.

“I think I might have a bad influence on you, Hermione Granger.”

Half an hour later the gnomes had run out of apples and the couple watched with wands raised whilst the fruit paraded through the air, as if pulled by an invisible string. One by one, they piled into bowls, and pots, and pans in the kitchen of The Burrow.

“That’s a lot of apples” Fred stated, looking around. There was literally no bigger container left that wasn’t brimming with ripe red and green apples, and the sweet smell wafted through the air, announcing to everyone in the house that it was officially autumn. But still the apples kept coming in through the door, now piling into the sink and the oven.

Hermione risked a look outside and a frown appeared on her forehead.

“Fred, we might be confronted with more apples than we bargained for.”

Fred leaned against the counter and folded his arms in front of his chest.

“Blessed, more like.”

“Look around you. Is it a blessing or a curse that they’re now starting to pile onto the shelves?” Hermione asked, indicating the whole kitchen.

“Well…”

“This is apple-geddon. How are we supposed to bake anything or cook anything if the kitchen is full of apples?”

“We could redirect them into Percy’s study” Fred suggested nonchalantly.

“Fred!”

“Or we could leave the mess for mum to sort out. She was the one who told us to do the de-gnoming after all, so she kind of had it coming.”

Hermione looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and exasperation.

“I am not leaving this mess for your mum to clean up.”

Fred shrugged.

“So what are you going to do?”

Hermione looked around in distress. The apples kept coming and it seemed there was an endless supply of them.

“I don’t know,” she admitted with a quiet voice, fidgeting on the spot.

She was adorable like this. Fred loved her for the fierce determination that she usually displayed, but he couldn’t help that his favourite moments with her always stemmed from when she showed her vulnerable side. Hermione Granger - typically a control-freak -  when not in full control of a situation was beyond cute. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her fiercely, then looked into her eyes, fixing them with his gaze.

“Can you manage to stop worrying for a second?”

She tried to extricate herself from his grip, still focussed on the apple-problem, but Fred’s grip was relentless and after a bit of half-hearted struggling, she finally gave up. The smell of apples was so prominent it became almost palpable and it mixed with Fred’s scent that was somewhere between a log fire and natural resin. She inhaled deeply and noticed how her heart rate slowed down and the big red “PANIC NOW” sign in her head stopped flashing vigorously. When had Fred Weasley become the person that could still her heart and calm her down in situations of chaos? He’d been in the background for years -  always in her circle of acquaintances, but not one of her closest friends.

After her break-up with Ron, Hermione had been sure she would never set foot into the burrow again. But one day, Fred had shown up at the bookshop during lunch-break. He’d been carrying a huge leather-bound volume a customer gave him in lieu of payment, and two steaming hot cups of coffee. The weekend afterwards, she’d been at The Burrow for lunch, because Fred invited her and Ron was out for the night. Bit by bit, they had grown closer and closer until Fred became what Ron had never been: her rock, her anchor, and her home.

As she kissed him back, abandoning all thoughts about the apple-problem at hand, she had to admit that she was a lucky woman indeed to call this man her boyfriend. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thx to MaraudingManaged for beta-reading this!


End file.
